how do conservatives think talking to children works? if a four year old came up to me and said “i’m a cat!!” i would say “really? what makes you a cat?” and they’d say some shit like “i have claws >:)” and i’d be like “oh wow, you do have claws. but wait, i thought cats had pointed ears!” and they’d say “they DO!!!” and then i’d pull up a picture of an elf and ask “is THIS a cat?” and they’d yell “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”
u wouldn’t say “fucking hell, Emily, get it together. this is the real world”
“We chose the term “asexual” to describe ourselves because both “celibate” and “anti-sexual” have connotations we wished to avoid: the first implies that one has sacrificed sexuality for some higher good, the second that sexuality is degrading or somehow inherently bad. “Asexual”, as we use it, does not mean “without sex” but “relating sexually to no one”. This does not, of course, exclude masturbation but implies that if one has sexual feelings they do not require another person for their expression. Asexuality is, simply, self-contained sexuality.”
And that’s only the date that Manifesto was written, so asexuals as members of a community must have existed at least some time before that.
So, no: we are not just Tumblr trenders. Get out of here with that.
supporting my asexual friends and foes by rebbloging this
It’s 50 years this month since the first version of the Asexual Manifesto was written. Aces have been writing about our experiences under this name for at least half a century. We are not an internet fad.
Well my point is that all that “you know what happens to pedophiles/rapists in prison wink wink nudge nudge” shit all comes down to thinking that rape is a punishment that certain people can earn. That there is a crime you can commit that makes you into a bad enough person that you not only deserve to be sexually assaulted, but that your assault is expected and celebrated.
Now let’s put aside the bigotry present in the prison industrial complex. Let’s put aside how prison is a weapon used against “unwanted” people in society, to take away their voting rights and force them into prison labor, aka slavery. Let’s put aside the massive amounts of false accusations and biased judges and an increasing number of laws designed to change the definition of sexual assault to put certain kinds of people behind bars.
Let’s put all that aside because, at the end of the day, no one “deserves” to be sexually assaulted. No one “earns” that, no one is “asking for” that. Sexual assault is not an appropriate “punishment” for wearing revealing clothes or getting drunk or marrying the wrong person and it’s also not an appropriate “punishment” for beong a bad person. Even the cruelest, most sadistic person does not deserve to be sexually assaulted. It does not matter what crimes they’ve committed, if they’ve even sexually assaulted other people before.
Any argument otherwise is rape apologism. Full stop. You either believe that some people deserve to be sexually assaulted or you don’t and there’s a correct choice here.
i think grossness is a vital aspect of life btw and we all experience it and i think its important to represent in art and i think oversanitization of popular media is 100% our downfall. things are gross and disgusting and yucky and thats life we cannot deny ourselves this
I keep thinking about this in the context of caring for my ageing patients. No one TELLS them, before they’re old, how things are going to change, or why. No one talks about the loss of elastin, and how that doesn’t just affect your skin looking old, but also how it heals. No one warns them that their skin will become paper-thin if they live long enough, incredibly fragile and easy to tear. Just “hurr dur wrinkly!!!”
No one tells them their bowels are going to lose strength and coordination, so it gets more and more difficult to have bowel movements. No one warns them about obstipation, much less bowel obstructions. I have a saying I repeat often in clinic: “Proper pooping prevents problems!” I say it because it makes people chuckle, because it destigmatizes needing to poop. Everyone poops. And it turns out pooping requires both a complex network of nerves to create peristalsis, and stools soft enough to move through the bowels, and I have watched more than one elderly patient die because their bowels stopped working right.
No one talks about hemorrhoids, so I have patients coming in terrified by blood in their stools–and listen, blood in your poop is definitely a good reason to see a doctor; if you’re over 50 and you haven’t had a colonoscopy, get one. It’s the best health screening we have evidence for, in my opinion. Colon cancer is a bitch. But more commonly, people have bloody stools because they have either hemorrhoids that are bleeding or because they have an anal fissure after straining on a hard bowel movement. Do you know what a hemorrhoid is? I didn’t, until I was well into medical school. Everyone has them. They’re venous columns that surround the rectum and anus. Internal ones can bleed; external ones can itch. Most people will get them eventually. Be kind about them.
Everyone is going to have trouble peeing if they live long enough. Men can’t start, women can’t stop. Because people with prostates will often have benign enlargement of the prostate–it’s not cancer, but it gets bigger–and the urethra, the tube that lets urine leave the bladder, goes through the prostate. Bigger prostate = compressed tube, less flow. Meanwhile, people with uteruses have much shorter urethras, which means that when we lose that beautiful collagen and elastic, we also lose it in the two sphincters that help us keep from leaking urine, and so we leak urine. Especially when something triggers an increase in intra-abdominal pressure, like a sneeze or a cough or a laugh.
All these things people are taught to be ashamed of and embarrassed about–they are so common. They’re normal parts of having a human body and doing the things one does with a human body. Poop trouble? Welcome to the club! People have been writing about their cures for constipation for as long as written language has existed. Listen, you are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone. And that means that when someone else has a gross problem, you must be kind to them, because that is going to be you. There will be a day when you have diarrhea, because viral gastroenteritis spreads like wildfire every winter. There will be a day when you cough a huge glob of mucus comes out, because mucus is a natural defense mechanism and kind of miraculous but also nasty. Every gross thing a body can do, yours is likely to do, if not now then later.
America has a weird relationship with cults where they’re terrified of small cults (or organizations they think are cults) but completely normalized massive cults that hurt many more people (eg: LDS Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Amish, Scientology, most Megachurches)
To anybody asking if the Amish are a cult, the answer is yes, very much so.
They’re a high control group that isolate you from society. The cult decides how you dress, how you behave, who you marry and how. They control what you know, blocking all information from the outside world. They control how you feel and what you’re allowed to think with threats of both social and supernatural harm. They’re a cult.
The best method to determine if a group is a cult, in my opinion, is Steven Hassan’s (cult expert and former cult member himself) BITE model.
BITE stands for Behavior Control, Information Control, Thought Control, and Emotional Control.
The more points a group “scores” on the model, the more of a cult it is.
I think this model is the best one for several reasons:
It’s more nuanced than “cult” or “not cult” and doesn’t make false equivalences between groups
It’s versatile, applying to groups big and small, and cults of all kinds, religious, political, financial, etc.
It focuses on what’s important, which is what the cult does to its members, and those members’ experiences, and not on irrelevant details like how uncommon their doctrines are or whether they have a charismatic leader
This is a great example of Thought Control used by cults whenever they’re confronted with criticism.
The creator of the BITE Model considers abusive relationships to be two-person cults.
As someone who grew up in the Mennonite church around one of the biggest Amish populations in the country… both Amish and Mennonites are cults. Outsiders view them as “quirky” and “harmless” because they’re not DEATH cults. Doesn’t make them not cults.
